It was such a refreshing reading! A classic story, a classic style. We all know that it’s a love story. With suspense, emotions, doubts, regrets, ups and downs, complications, bliss, erotica, sun rises and sun sets, laughter and tears,  …. .

I also discovered that it’s about things we hold dear or are keen to understand even a hundred years later:

Criticism: “that’s quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing”;

Knowledge: “real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness: out of your belly and your penis, as much as out of your brain and mind”;

Anger: “The steam of so much boredom, and discontent and anger out of all the people, just kills the vitality I the air.”

Vulnerability of a woman in love: “In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman”.

Past-present-future: “That was the past. The present lay below. God  alone knows where the future lies”.

Poverty and disparity: “Poverty is ugly. The disparity is fate” (I would disagree on the last one though).

Industrialisation and consumerism: “Everything is to be sold and paid. Everything is sold. You don’t give one heart-beat of real sympathy”.

A very natural basic view on relationships: “I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything  would come all right”.

Exits: “Just make up your mind to it, an’ you’ve got out o’ th’ mess.”

Perspective on human body: “with the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle  killed it, and Jesus finished it off. Bot now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And It will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of human body. ”

At times, this book is poetry and prose which sings: “flowers have no houses”, “every parting means a meeting elsewhere”, “love can be wonderful: when you feel you live, and are in the very middle of creation”, “she was at home, in his eyes”

My absolute favourite quote “Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, an inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty, not even the body of beauty, but lambency, the warm white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!”